23 October 2006
Presley Chweneyagae, the young star of South Africa's Oscar-winning movie Tsotsi, has beaten Hollywood heavyweights Denzel Washington and Cuba Gooding Jnr to walk off with the award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role at the Black Movie Awards.
The gala awards, held in Los Angeles last week, recognise creative achievement by people of African descent in feature-length motion pictures, and honour outstanding films portraying the black experience.
Chweneyagae was up against Washington for Inside Man, Gooding for Shadowboxer, Chiwetel Ejiofor for Kinky Boots and Tyrese Gibson for Waist Deep. The award was an early birthday present for the young actor, who turns 22 on Thursday.
Tsotsi won an Academy Award for best foreign language film in March this year. The film tells the story of a vicious and emotionally dead young gangster, played by Chweneyagae, who finds redemption when he inadvertently kidnaps a baby in a hijacked car.
In its North American debut, the film won the People's Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
It was also the first production in over seven years to win both the audience and critics' awards for best film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The production reportedly received the highest audience rating of any film ever screened at Edinburgh.
Tsotsi has also won major awards at the Pan African Film and Arts Festival, the Santa Barbara Film Festival, the Thessaloniki Film Festival, the Denver International Film Festival, the Cape Town World Cinema Festival, the St Louis International Film Festival, the Los Angeles AFI Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, as well as being nominated for the UK's prestigious Bafta Awards.
Chweneyagae, too, has been piling up the prizes. He recently won the best actor award at the Bangkok Festival, and in early October won the best actor in a feature award at the Apollo Festival in the Karoo town of Victoria West.
And a play he co-wrote with Paul Grootboom, Relativity, has won a Harold Angel Award in the UK, where it is touring.
"It was really thrilling," Chweneyagae told the Sowetan newspaper of his Black Movie Awards win. "It was a tough competition. These are the guys [Washington and Gooding] I grew up watching."
SouthAfrica.info reporter
|
